it's "keep," not "stay" —

Google slips, accidentally unveils Evernote-like Google Keep service

A launch for the service may be imminent.

Google is prepping to launch a cloud-based notetaking service to compete with Evernote and Simplenote, according to a sighting by AndroidPolice. Google briefly went live with a service called Keep that appeared to be designed for ubiquitous content capture and integration with the company's cloud storage service, Drive.

Google Keep will present an interface that lets users create notes with checklist items, text, or images inside. The notes can be titled and color-coded, but little other functionality is discernible from the screenshots. TechCrunch points out that Google accidentally outed Keep last July in a Google+ screenshot that included a “save to Google Keep” option.

Services like Simplenote, Microsoft’s OneNote, Springpad, and Evernote continue to grow in popularity for their ease of capture of text, photos, audio, and video, as well as their ability to make that content available across mobile, desktop, and Web interfaces (though they aren’t without their problems). Google currently lacks a service that offers this functionality. You may resort to e-mailing yourself everything, but there could be a better way. The slip may indicate that Google is close to an official launch, so we'll watch and wait.

Promoted Comments

Great, so Google targets yet another thriving area, puts everyone else out of business with their "free" service, then 3 years later decides they're bored and discontinues it leaving everybody in the lurch.

Note to google: at least give users a couple of week to forget about Reader before "leaking" the next area you plan to do it to.

74 posts | registered Feb 10, 2005

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Ever wonder if "Google slips" are just a way to increase chatter and gauge consumer reaction to a new product? It certainly seems cheaper to "accidentally" go live with a product, turn if off as soon as someone notices, and then watch what happens than to actually promote a new product.

As an ex-user of Google Notebook and someone who is terrible at organizing I say hell yeah! And it's another reason to stick with Android for my next phone. This should integrate perfectly into Google Now.

Great, so Google targets yet another thriving area, puts everyone else out of business with their "free" service, then 3 years later decides they're bored and discontinues it leaving everybody in the lurch.

Note to google: at least give users a couple of week to forget about Reader before "leaking" the next area you plan to do it to.

Great, so Google targets yet another thriving area, puts everyone else out of business with their "free" service, then 3 years later decides they're bored and discontinues it leaving everybody in the lurch.

Note to google: at least give users a couple of week to forget about Reader before "leaking" the next area you plan to do it to.

Sure sounds like a play right out of microsoft's playbook! They called it Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

Great, so Google targets yet another thriving area, puts everyone else out of business with their "free" service, then 3 years later decides they're bored and discontinues it leaving everybody in the lurch.

Note to google: at least give users a couple of week to forget about Reader before "leaking" the next area you plan to do it to.

I think it's safe to assume that Google will eventually do anything in cloud software that may be useful. Hasn't Google been releasing cloud-based software longer than most?

I'm not against using a product I haven't seen, but it would be a shame if they add a ton of complexity to what was a pretty basic calendar/to do list integration.

The more the take away, the less reason I have to stay with them or be interested in new products. I can understand some amount of consolidation of products, but for something as simple as tasks? That is just crazy

Anyway, before learning about what will be happening to Reader I might have been excited about this as I use Evernote quite a bit, and integrating it with features found in other Google products would have been interesting. Now, it won't really be on my radar.

Sure sounds like a play right out of microsoft's playbook! They called it Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

Eh, not quite. The Extinguish part of that wasn't related to MS killing off their own products, but rather their competitors. Google is pretty well known to embrace open standards rather than trying to extend them in order to kill off the competition MS-style. If Google releases a product that competes with an existing standard, it's not some extension of that standard. It's typically a completely new standard.

Considering Evernote has turned into more of a platform for a wide variety of personal information management apps (Evernote Food, Evernote Hello, etc.), and that Google Wave died, only to resurrect as a platform for a wide variety of personal information management apps (updated Google Docs, Google+, etc.), it's inevitable that they will have substantial feature overlap.

I, for one, think this is healthy competition. As for all that "divide and conquer" speculation, remember that Evernote is already free, too (and that Google has had some difficulty expanding into entrenched markets, as with Google+).

1) provide a free service2) suck all the money out of the market, 3) bankrupt their competitors 4) cancel their free service

Thanks, Google.

I understand being upset about Reader, but do people who write this sort of comment not remember RSS feed readers before Reader? There was *never* any money in that market. All the feed readers were free or ad-based. The only thing google even provided that could have been charged for is feed history, which is exactly what feedly, for instance, is charging for now.

As an ex-user of Google Notebook and someone who is terrible at organizing I say hell yeah! And it's another reason to stick with Android for my next phone. This should integrate perfectly into Google Now.

As an "EX-user of Google Notebook," I figured you'd have learned your lesson by now about depending on Google to reliably store your notes for longer than the three years or so before they decide its not contributing to the bottom line (or Google Plus) enough and shut it down.

But hey, we can always use Facebook and Twitter to store all our notes for us!!1 Plz retweet this screenshot of a Notepad file, it'll make it easier to find later!

I, for one, think this is healthy competition. As for all that "divide and conquer" speculation, remember that Evernote is already free, too (and that Google has had some difficulty expanding into entrenched markets, as with Google+).

Good point. If true then it is fairly likely to be axed and would be a further future source of painful data migration.

I can't see any excitement over this, or I am just still bitter over Reader.

Google has an uphill battle showing the public they are committed to the product. Outside of Gmail, Google+ and Adwords. I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't pull the plug on the service if it showed lack luster adoption.

And thats not even talking about how creepy google can be about serving targeted ads. I don't think I need to be giving any more data to google.

For me to switch, Google is going to have to come out with a feature that shows they are just not a me too service.

Now that I'm starting to use Google Docs (Drive) more, I'm starting to distrust Google a bit. I'm just not a free- but-we'll-use-your-info kind of guy, I guess, although it is a nice way to get your feet wet before paying up.

After Reader going down, I'm also not in the mood to go all-in to something like this, either. I'll give it a go, though.

I can't see any excitement over this, or I am just still bitter over Reader.

Well, even if you weren't bitter, it is just a note-taking app Not a whole lot to get excited about.

I am kind of weird and get excited over these things. As a teacher who uses a lot of current events articles in class, with Evernote I don't have to keep filing cabinets full of articles, or save pdf copies, etc. I can also cross tag articles, so that I don't have to try to figure out what is the best label to file an article under. That made and makes me pretty excited, but like I said weird.

Can't get me away from OneNote. It has to be the most undervalued product in the Office arsenal.

Considering they have native apps for virtually every platform, a web based version, a full featured metro version, a desktop version. Other than the fact that is isn't free (although it comes with every single possible office sku) it is the best note taking app out there. Using it on the surface pro has only made me enjoy using it more.

Can't get me away from OneNote. It has to be the most undervalued product in the Office arsenal.

Considering they have native apps for virtually every platform, a web based version, a full featured metro version, a desktop version. Other than the fact that is isn't free (although it comes with every single possible office sku) it is the best note taking app out there.

Except for OS X and all the Office for Mac SKUs, which alienates a large number of potential users (especially students).

As for Keep, I'll wait until it's released before I subscribe to Evernote, but it'll have to be very amazing for me to be willing to switch to it.

Great, so Google targets yet another thriving area, puts everyone else out of business with their "free" service, then 3 years later decides they're bored and discontinues it leaving everybody in the lurch.

Note to google: at least give users a couple of week to forget about Reader before "leaking" the next area you plan to do it to.

Totally. No kidding. I'm a paying SimpleNote customer and it's not going to change.

(Rather more seriously, you may well be right. They seem to be "cleaning" capabilities that don't directly serve ads. Tasks most certainly doesn't, and hasn't seen a lot of love. They've left it up to third-party developers to put an actual interface on the thing. Which all means it can't be high on their totem pole. Lord, it's the only way I've found to fully integrate task lists across all my Windows and Android devices!)

I, for one, think this is healthy competition. As for all that "divide and conquer" speculation, remember that Evernote is already free, too (and that Google has had some difficulty expanding into entrenched markets, as with Google+).

True, but keep in mind Evernote does also offer several levels of paid service, which one can point to as evidence that it would be much harder for Evernote to extricate themselves from their product than it would (at the moment, at any rate) for Google to do so.

If Google offered similar pay plans for Keep it would probably go a long way toward reassuring any potential customers still miffed about Reader.

Can't get me away from OneNote. It has to be the most undervalued product in the Office arsenal.

Considering they have native apps for virtually every platform, a web based version, a full featured metro version, a desktop version. Other than the fact that is isn't free (although it comes with every single possible office sku) it is the best note taking app out there.

Except for OS X and all the Office for Mac SKUs, which alienates a large number of potential users (especially students).

I'm not sure I'd consider the number of users of Office for Mac to be "large". But you can still use the web-based version of OneNote, it's actually very well done. I regularly switch between that and the metro version.

Can't get me away from OneNote. It has to be the most undervalued product in the Office arsenal.

Considering they have native apps for virtually every platform, a web based version, a full featured metro version, a desktop version. Other than the fact that is isn't free (although it comes with every single possible office sku) it is the best note taking app out there. Using it on the surface pro has only made me enjoy using it more.

And I'm another with you. OneNote is awesome, and "free" in the context of buying the Office Suite for the other products. I'm using MobileNoter to sync and read/edit the OneNote files on my Android devices - it's a little more full-featured than the usual gimp-it-for-mobile Microsoft mobile app.